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Edith Maturin and the Wide World Magazine:
New Woman Rewritings of Imperial Adventure1
Sigrid Anderson Cordell
In a telling moment in Edith Maturin’s 1899 account of her life in India, she describes
fighting off a potential attacker attempting to enter her bedroom in the middle of the night.
Because she is staying overnight in a remote cabin, she has only the nominal protection of “the
Government-chosen khansamah [head servant] and chokey-dar [watchman]” (364). Lying
awake, she looks up to find “a huge black man” peering in through the door with an “odiously
fiendish expression” (364, emphasis in original). Having anticipated such an attack, she is armed
with her son’s pop gun, and when she spots the intruder, she scares him away by firing it off. As
she writes, “I sat up, took the pistol, and pointed it at him. He saw me distinctly, and ducked as I
fired. Then away he went! I put another cap in the toy pistol, and, running to the door, opened it,
and fired again and again” (“Chamba Cinderella” 364). (Figure 1)
Published in the Wide World Magazine, George Newnes’s illustrated monthly of travel
and adventure, this account, and its accompanying illustration, perform some key rhetorical
work: through the description of a native attacker trying to enter her bedroom, Maturin draws on
Gothic motifs to portray herself as a vulnerable heroine; at the same time, her response to this
threat underscores her courage and resourcefulness as a New Woman adventurer. The
accompanying illustration emphasizes this double move: Maturin’s white nightgown and the
image of the shadowy figure suggests vulnerability, whereas her aggressive body language
indicates assertiveness and resolve. As this episode reveals, Maturin’s figuration as a brave and
unconventional female traveler depends on underscoring the colonial environment of India as
physical and sexual threat. Throughout the magazine, similar tales of female adventure combine
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both the discourse of empire and the gender politics of the New Woman novel, showing how the
imaginative space of periodicals, as well as the colonial space itself, presented an opportunity for
women writers to capitalize on a ready market and fashion a professional identity as an
adventurer. These women’s adventure stories — or, what I term imperial New Woman narratives
— are the focus of this essay; in particular, I will argue that periodicals like the Wide World
participated in a publishing economy in which the colonial landscape of India, and the New
Woman’s response to threats within that landscape, were essential commodities.
The Wide World regularly published accounts that, like Maturin’s, featured daring white
adventurers under attack by natives and wild animals around the globe. While the majority of
adventurers in the Wide World were white males, the magazine features a striking number of
narratives celebrating female adventurers, suggesting that the exotic or colonial space presented
an opportunity for white British women like Maturin to demonstrate their capability and to try on
new roles. In this way, the magazine’s pages reflect Vron Ware’s assertion that “the Empire
provided both a physical and an ideological space in which the different meanings of femininity
could be explored or contested” (120). This mode of liberating exploration is not, of course, free
of its own embeddedness in racial hierarchies, as Anne McClintock, Antoinette Burton, Jenny
Sharpe, Indira Ghose, and others have pointed out. Much attention has been paid in feminist
post-colonial studies to women’s narratives of empire and the ways in which travel allowed
women to transgress gender norms, while, as Ghose puts it, they were “also implicated in the
colonial power structures”(13).2 In this essay, I build on and extend this work by excavating how
the colonial landscape allowed women to construct themselves as professional writers in late
Victorian print culture. As I will demonstrate, Maturin’s narratives illuminate an economy of
gendered global experience within the publishing industry.
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The politics of race, gender, nation, and publication become visible in Maturin’s four-part
series of travel narratives, in which the packaging of image and text, as well as colonial India’s
threat alongside the New Woman’s desire for independence, work together to create a
marketable commodity. As Peter Sinnema, Laurel Brake, Marysa Demoor, and Julie Codell have
pointed out, considerable work is yet to be done in examining periodical print culture, especially
the ways in which images and text work together to create meaning.3 In the case of Maturin’s
narratives, it would be impossible to read these texts, and the paratextual elements surrounding
them, without noting the interconnections across race, class, and gender that Ghose and others
have pointed to; as presented in the magazine, Maturin’s feminist identity is inextricably linked
to her imperial identity. Maturin entered a crowded field of women’s travel narratives and carved
out a space for herself by relentlessly presenting herself as a combination of social rebel and
romantic heroine, all the while drawing on familiar narratives of the racial other, including the
trope of the English heroine stalked by a dark-skinned native. Throughout Maturin’s narratives,
she revels in the dangers to be found in the Indian landscape and boasts of her bravery in facing
both human and animal threats. Only by examining Maturin’s work through texts and paratexts
do we see how the figuration of the white female body under attack contributes to the packaging
of Maturin as an imperial New Woman adventurer in the Wide World’s pages.
Before examining the crafting of Maturin as an imperial New Woman, it is important to
understand how her work fits into the late-nineteenth century British publishing context, as well
as how her work compares to that of other women writers in the Wide World. The late nineteenth
century was an especially fruitful period for adventure narratives, and wildly popular titles by
Haggard, Stevenson, and Stoker testify to the public demand for stories featuring male
adventurers venturing into remote parts of the world. Likewise, travel narratives, both by male
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and female writers, found a ready audience and offered a broad scope for women both to share
their experiences and find a ready publishing outlet. Prominent women adventurers who
published accounts of their experiences include Mary Kingsley, Lady Anna Brassey, Isabella
Bird, and the Canadian Sarah Jeannette Duncan. Likewise, authors like Flora Annie Steel created
a publishing career out of writing about colonial India, both in advice books like The Complete
Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1887) and novels like On the Face of the Waters (1896), which
takes place during the 1857 Indian Mutiny. The British public’s enthusiasm for travel narratives
and adventure stories coincided with the height of the British Empire, and Stephen Arata has
explored the place of colonial adventure narratives, and concomitant anxieties about an
overstretched empire, in late-Victorian literary texts.4
Capitalizing on the popularity of travel narratives and adventure stories, as well as his
success with Tit Bits and the Strand, George Newnes founded the Wide World, subtitled An
Illustrated Monthly of True Narrative, in April 1898. The opening issue touted both the bizarre
nature of the travel narratives within its pages and their absolute veracity, a veracity that it
claimed to back up with the relatively new technology of mass-produced photographic evidence.
As the “Introduction” to the first issue declared, “The key-note of the Magazine is struck in the
motto on the cover — ‘Truth is Stranger than Fiction.’ This we hope to prove by personal
narratives and actual photographs [….] There will be no fiction in the Magazine, but yet it will
contain stories of weird adventure, more thrilling than any conceived by the novelist in his
wildest flights” (3). By the fourth volume, the magazine was including a map that plotted out the
locations of all the articles in an issue and illustrated the magazine’s global reach. (Figure 2)
Circulation figures for the magazine grew as a result of publishing the sensationalized adventures
of Louis de Rougemont, whose serialized account of his twenty years among the aborigines of
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Australia, subtitled “the most amazing story a man ever lived to tell,” began in August 1898
(451). De Rougemont was later exposed as a fraud, and the editor’s decision to continue running
the serial called the magazine’s commitment to non-fiction into question; however, according to
Frank Clune, De Rougement’s narrative expanded the magazine’s readership as “the thrilled
adventure-devourers of five continents eagerly awaited the next month’s gripping installments”
(13).5
Despite billing itself as “absolutely new in conception,” however, the Wide World’s
presentation of the world outside England relied on well-worn images of the exotic other
(Advertisement 3). As the Morning Post complained, “Some of the ‘wonders’ so profusely
photographed are very far from fresh in our illustrated periodicals. The Indian Fakirs, for
example, have become absolutely wearisome from their repeated appearances” (“Literary Notes”
2). Margaret Stetz has pointed out that, while the journal paid attention to new technologies like
photography, its “true” accounts adhered very closely to the Gothic tradition, which, in the
imperial context, "taught British readers [...] that the figure of the male 'native,' wherever he was
found, was usually animalistic, evil, murderous, potentially cannibalistic, and altogether
monstrous -- was, in effect, a Gothic monster" (27). Indeed, many of the accounts that appeared
in the journal presented non-white natives around the globe threatening or openly attacking white
adventurers. For example, in “Down the Perak River: A True Story,” a tale billed as “serv[ing] to
illustrate the dangers and difficulties Empire-builders have to encounter,” a British official in the
Federated Malay States describes his escape from a group of natives attempting to resist British
authority (12). The accompanying illustration shows his predecessor moments before his death
from “a terrific blow over the head with a sword” (13). (Figure 3) The native’s stance presents
him as the aggressor, visually suggesting the threat of native violence against the unsuspecting
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British administrator. The administrator’s air of unconcern contrasts markedly with the active
posture of the native, caught in the act of raising his sword. Alongside accounts like this one, the
pursued female body features prominently in the Wide World’s pages, as in Maude Crossland’s
“Experiences of a Somnambulist,” where the narrator, a delicate, white English heroine visiting
Australia, encounters what Stetz describes as “a series of entrapments” when she is pursued in
the night by a black “monster” who wants to carry her off. He chases her through a stream,
where she hides, screams in terror, and faints, only to wake in the arms of her rescuer, a fatherly
colonial administrator (38). (Figure 4) The accompanying illustration of the cringing white
heroine trapped by a wild-haired and wild-eyed “monster” — his aggressive body language
almost forcing her out of the frame — reinforces an image of unprotected white femininity under
attack.
While Crossland’s narrative presents a traveler in peril that is consistent with tropes that
run throughout the magazine, hers is not representative of the Wide World’s vision of English
womanhood. Instead, the magazine features an array of women travelers and settlers who
embrace the challenges and adventure offered by life in far-flung locations, suggesting that the
adventure narrative was a fruitful space for demonstrating one's New Womanhood. In one
account, for example, a young woman living in India finds a murderous tiger in her bedroom.
While the tiger is busy devouring her pet mastiff, she sneaks up and shoots him with a revolver.
As a result of her bravery, she is treated as a heroine by the villagers, who are deeply grateful
that she has rid the neighborhood of a threat. In the tradition of tiger hunting, the villagers
present her with the skin, singing in her honor, “Bring forth blossoms, put them on white
woman’s head/she killed man-eater: Burra Bagh is dead” (Marshall 484). Far from the protected
heroine of Crossland’s tale, this narrator is celebrated for her bravery. The pages of the Wide
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World are full of similar stories that represent extraordinary moments in which women take on
the role of heroine or adventurer. Looked at in the broader context of the magazine, and the late
nineteenth-century publishing world, these stories reveal the ways in which travel presented
opportunities for women writers both to explore new roles and to find a publishing outlet.
Alongside articles detailing daring adventures, the magazine also celebrated the
tribulations and successes of women attempting to maintain middle-class English households in
foreign lands. For example, “A Mother’s Trial in India” by Mrs. E.M. Stewart points to the many
dangers faced by English families trying to live in India and highlights Stewart’s sense of being
under siege by the colonial landscape. In this story, Stewart describes the challenges of
protecting her family, in particular her two children, from the manifold threats that they
experience while living in India, such as when a cobra enters the house. To elevate the tale’s
sense of peril, the story is accompanied by a photo of Stewart’s two angelic-looking children,
implying that they are defenseless innocents who must be protected, as well as an illustration of
the terrified narrator standing on a table watching as a group of men try to subdue the snake.
(Figures 5 and 6) Stories such as this one emphasize the central role that women played in
domesticating the colonial landscape, as well as the importance of maintaining a British
household regardless of the location. In fact, the Wide World repeatedly reports on the efforts of
English women working to insulate their families from the dangers and chaos of the colonial
environment, such as in “Our First Dinner Party in India,” in which Mrs. C.E. Phillimore
describes a dinner party that went disastrously awry because of her servants’ refusal to adhere to
British standards. The story opens with her assigning blame to the native servants who had failed
to live up to her expectations: “Never shall I forget that evening eleven or twelve years ago!
Never shall I forgive that wretched cook and Butler” (181).
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Maturin’s narratives participate in this print economy of physical and social threat by
presenting her as a romantic heroine under siege, while at the same time emphasizing her role as
a social rebel. Both the text of her stories and the paratextual materials surrounding them -including editorial introductions, romanticized line drawings, and highly stylized theatrical
photographs of the author — create and market an image of Maturin as an Imperial New Woman
heroine. Although it is unlikely that Maturin had control over how her work was packaged in the
Wide World, its presentation stands out, even within the context of the magazine, implying a
distinct choice to market her in this way. Through these texts and paratexts, she is branded as an
imperial New Woman, and this image draws on a nexus of late nineteenth-century discourses
surrounding empire, class, and gender.
Throughout her narratives in the Wide World, Maturin presents herself as a resourceful,
rebellious character chafing under any sort of authority. Throughout, she emphasizes her
unconventionality, as well as the enthusiasm with which she embraces her adventures. Like
many others, Maturin saw the empire as a space of opportunity and freedom from restraint, and
the landscape of colonial India is key to her New Womanhood. Maturin spent most of her life in
either India or South Africa, living first in India with her father, a pioneering tea planter in
Assam who, according to her sister Leila, “was the first to avail himself of the offer made by
Government at that time of granting free (or for merely nominal sums) large tracts of land for the
cultivation of the tea plant” (Boustead 548).6 When Maturin was sent back to England during her
childhood, she dreamed of returning to India, a place that appeared in her daydreams as a space
for adventure where she would be free of the confines of proper English womanhood. As she
explains:
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All through the dreary years of education and deportment in our grandmother’s
dignified home in a quiet part of England we [she and her sister] had talked, and
planned, and dreamt of the day when our father would fetch us and take us back
to India. While grandmamma, an aunt, and our governess conversed to us of
morals, accomplishments, and eternity, we pondered on hair-breadth escapes,
perilous adventures […] when the day should come to spread our wings towards
the East. (158)
For the young Edith, India represented a space for a kind of dashing heroism that was considered
unacceptable for women in England.
However, as Maturin tells the reader, even when she does return to India, she is frustrated
by the limitations placed on her by a strict father who had “stiff, old-fashioned ideas as to the
ways of young men and maidens” (“Candle” 324). Her father’s moves to insulate her from the
threats of both the Indian landscape and the young British officers sent to police it lead her to
circumvent his rules and invite adventure. As a result, Maturin frames her adventures as
instances of rebellion in which she intentionally courts danger — and, for the most part, finds her
own way out of it — precisely because of her impatience with the role of protected heroine. The
first installment in her four narratives begins with a dispute with her father over whether she
would panic if she came face to face with a tiger. As Precious McKenzie Stearns has pointed out,
hunting was a “marker of imperial femininity” for women in India, proving that “they could
defend themselves from ferocious Indian wildlife and also the supposed threat posed by
hypersexual, immoral Indian men” (24). However, as Maturin complains, “We had been here [in
India] five weeks, daily longing to see a tiger or some other murderous animal, but so far hadn’t
caught a glimpse of even the tip of a speckled tail” (158). When her father bids her to remain
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within protected boundaries, she deliberately gets herself and her sister lost so that she will have
an opportunity to prove her courage. As a result, they are not only chased by a tiger, but are also
caught in a massive jungle fire. The story ends with her expressing satisfaction that she has
proven her bravery: “It was many months before papa dared joke us about our man-eater, or call
us ‘his heroines’; and when he did, we generally told the story to someone, and had the
satisfaction of hearing that, in their humble opinion, we had at any rate shown that we had
‘plenty of grit’” (164, emphasis in original).
Maturin further emphasizes her refusal to conform to conventional notions of femininity
by highlighting her attempts to circumvent limits on her access to male company. In the second
narrative, “A Candle in the Window,” Maturin explains that her father severely restricts her
opportunities to spend unsupervised time with young men and is “a real martinet with us girls”
(324). When, for once, he allows her and her sister to invite two officers to dinner, the girls are
horrified when the men are sent away in a rainstorm rather than allowed to stay the night. Since
their home is in an isolated area in the Himalayas, “and the only way home was a lonely,
winding, dangerous path of at least four miles,” the girls are terrified that their swains will meet
with an accident (326). As a result, they prop open the bathroom door and leave a candle in the
window in hopes that it will guide the young men back to the house. The sisters’ plan results in
disaster, however, when they awake to find a cheetah in their room. It is not until years later that
they confess to their father how they got themselves into this predicament — in fact, they wait
until both of them are married to reveal that they had left their back door open so that the young
men could sneak in during the night. Unsurprisingly, their father is “deeply shocked, especially
because we told it to him with much glee, and not, as he was certain his great-grandmother
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would have done, ‘with bated breath and blushes’” (330). Far from blushing, Maturin delights in
recounting the cause of her adventure.
In this way, Maturin presents herself (and her sister, who has a minor role in most of
these narratives) as a rebellious, strong-willed individual, unwilling to be boxed in by ideas of
what is safe or proper for a woman. Accompanying Maturin’s descriptions of her frustration with
convention and her father’s attempts to protect her, the headnotes to each story offer an
additional editorial gloss that presents Maturin as a spirited rebel. These headnotes introduce the
reader to Maturin and give a hint less of what type of narrative is to come than of what kind of
narrator will be telling it. Kate Jackson asserts that the articles in the Wide World are not just
about the places that the travelers have been, but are just as much about the travelers themselves.
As she points out, narratives in the Wide World, like other late nineteenth-century travel
narratives, “tended to be […] autobiographical, containing a substantial element of personal
reaction and anecdote, and designed largely to provide entertainment” (171). Jackson’s reading
of the anecdotes as revealing more about the authors themselves than anything else is an astute
one, especially in light of narratives such as Maturin’s, which foreground her personality and her
reactions to the foreign and exotic. We are told, for instance, that the first account is “a personal
narrative of the awful plight into which two high-spirited and mischievous English girls got
themselves in one of the wildest parts of India” (“Night to Remember” 158). Both Mrs. Maturin
and her sister are presented here as not only “high-spirited” and “mischievous,” but also as
having gotten themselves into trouble. As Maturin puts it elsewhere, she and her sister were “full
of fun […] [and] a constant torment” (“Candle” 325). Likewise, in the lead-in to the last
narrative, the editor explains that “It must be admitted that Mrs. Maturin, as a girl, gave an
incredible amount of trouble to all who had charge of her — as this her latest reminiscence
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amply testifies” (“Ocean” 618). Again, this introduction frames her as high-spirited, even
trouble-making, and emphasizes her impulse to resist authority.
While Maturin’s text and the headnotes describe her as unconventional and rebellious,
the accompanying photographs present an image of romantic femininity. In Tom Gretton’s
analysis of page design in nineteenth-century magazines, he examines how the “logic of
illustration” was being worked out in this period (684). In some periodicals, he points out, the
“pictures add value not so much to the texts with which they cohabit as to the commodity which
supports them both” (684). Although the “commodity” that he refers to is the magazine itself,
which is being sold both through the images and the text, it can also refer in this case to the
persona of Edith Maturin, who is composed through the juxtaposition of images and text. These
photographs present idealized images of Maturin, often in fancy dress, as though she is in the
midst of acting out a particular character. In the first narrative, both Maturin and her sister are
pictured in what appear to be costumes; Maturin is wearing white, slightly translucent fabric, and
is shown with a floral crown and veil. Her eyes wear a dreamy, faraway look, and her left arm is
raised as though caught in the midst of a dance, and in this way the photograph resembles a Julia
Margaret Cameron photograph or a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The image’s placement on the page
suggests Maturin’s role as a fragile heroine in need of protection. On the first page of the
account, in what the visual rhetoric of the magazine generally presents as the position of the
heroic narrator, the editors have placed a photograph of Maturin’s father, Colonel Money. It is
only on the next page that the editors have placed images of Maturin and her younger sister, thus
visually suggesting the father’s position as protector of the two girls (Figure 7).
This combination of vulnerability and eagerness for adventure comes together most fully
in the illustrations accompanying the stories. Each of the drawings is done by Paul Hardy, a
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prolific late-Victorian illustrator whose pictures are seen throughout the Wide World. The
pictures depict Maturin very much in the Gibson Girl tradition (Figure 8) and emphasize her
beauty, but they also show her as an active, assertive, even aggressive figure, such as when she
urges her pony away from the jungle fire in the first account (Figure 9). In the image, she leans
forward against her pony’s neck with whip aloft. She does not look back at the fire, nor does she
show terror, and her body language indicates a self-possessed determination to escape. Most
strikingly, in the picture illustrating the midnight attack (shown at the beginning of this essay),
she sits up in bed, wide awake and leaning forward, aiming the toy gun toward the shadowy
figure that can be seen through the door. Again, she shows no fear, but rather determinedly takes
aim at the intruder. In this way, text and image present two visions of Maturin: both as a
romantic heroine and as a strong New Woman adventurer.
Although, as stated above, there is no evidence that Maturin had any editorial control
over the illustrations accompanying her text, the dual image presented by the paratextual
materials extends the narrative that Maturin tells about herself as an adventurous New Woman,
while also presenting her as a potentially vulnerable heroine. As I have argued, this split is part
of a print economy in which her Imperial New Womanhood depends upon the existence of a
threat. According to Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, being attentive to the nuances of
such splits is key to understanding the New Woman in the international context, as well as “the
processes by which the new gendered identities emerging at the end of the nineteenth and in the
early twentieth century brought together elements of the traditional and the radically new” (3). In
the narratives themselves, Maturin uses India as a threatening backdrop to throw her courageous
New Womanhood into relief in a way that is analogous to Rosemary Marangoly George’s
observation that the colonial space allowed white British women to achieve a form of power, but
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only in relation (or in comparison to) the native Other. George asserts that “[i]f the
Englishwoman recognizes herself and is recognized as national subject only outside the national
boundaries, then she becomes ‘of the master race’ only in the presence of ‘the native’ who will
hail her as ‘memsahib’ (literally, ‘Madame boss’)” (107). We see this in action in Maturin’s
narratives, such as when she takes direct retaliation on a native servant to vent her frustration
after spending a frightening night locked in a room with a cheetah: “I […] seized and threw wet
mud at two or three servants, who […] were gathering here and there. Having plastered the
astonished kidmudgar’s face I felt much better” (330). Maturin “felt much better” after venting
her emotions and, by implication, because she has asserted that she can use her subordinates as
targets for her anger. Likewise, India provides a backdrop for Maturin to demonstrate a level of
adventurousness and bravery unavailable to her back home in England.
The dependence of Maturin’s New Womanhood on the backdrop of colonial India
becomes most visible in the third installment, which recounts her adventures as the wife of a
British soldier in an Indian hill station and includes the midnight attack episode with which this
essay opens. This episode shows Maturin’s embeddedness in discourses of gender and empire,
and it is worth unpacking its multiple layers to draw out the ways in which her account is
marketed through textual and paratextual layers of gendered colonialism. In this story, Maturin
draws on a host of Orientalizing motifs in order to underscore her position as a brave adventurer,
beginning with a description of a group of bored ladies in Dalhousie, a British hill station in the
Punjab region, rehearsing some in-house theatricals “in aid of charity” (358). The main sequence
in the theatricals involves a Turkish dance number, in which the ladies perform a scene in a
harem, with a doctor playing the role of “a jolly little Pasha, and performed his part so well that
three infuriated husbands in the audience insisted on coming behind in the ten minutes’ interval
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to ask him what he meant by holding their wives so tight that they screamed” (359). This playacting of stereotypes of eastern sexual decadence frames the second half of the story, which
revolves around violence, both threatened and actual, and native attempts at revenge for
mistreatment by the British.
In the second half of the story, the tone shifts from frivolity to danger when Maturin, her
children, and her servants are left behind in the remote hill station long after the season has
ended. At this time of year, there is “no food unless you seized it from the natives by force”
(360). Facing the possibility of running out of food, this is exactly what Maturin directs her
servant to do, and the household is provided with a sheep in the following manner: “we had sent
my khansamah twenty miles into Chamba to fetch [the sheep]. He obtained it by giving its owner
a clout over the head, and then making off as hard as his legs would carry him, first throwing the
price of it down at the infuriated native’s feet; or he said he did” (360). This act of violent
appropriation sparks a series of attacks and counter-attacks in which Maturin ultimately emerges
as the victorious British heroine. The gender and racial politics at work here are inextricably
connected to the politics of British occupation in this region in the late nineteenth century.
Chamba (now part of present-day Himachal Pradesh), where the action takes place, was a
princely state, meaning that it was not formally part of Britain’s colonial empire, but ostensibly
autonomous. The state, which had supported the British in the mutiny, was ruled by a Rajah who
proved his loyalty to the British crown through an annual monetary tribute, originally set at
12,000 rupees, but, through Indian land concessions, had been reduced to 3,800 rupees by 1904
(Gazeteer 109). While the Rajah was ostensibly in control, a British administrator acted as
Superintendent to “assist” in governance. In Maturin’s story, the Rajah is friendly to the British,
but this is clearly not the case for the local tribes, whose loyalties were more uneven. Although
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Maturin never reveals which tribe the owner of the sheep belongs to, it is clear that the act of
appropriating property from a native for the use of a British household symbolizes not just a
violation of property, but an assault on native autonomy.
In revenge, the men of the tribe attack the hill station, but they are scared off, taking the
sheep and leaving a shoe behind. The next day, at the Rajah’s suggestion, Maturin uses the shoe
left behind by the attacker to “try” a group of suspects. As we are told, “The ceremony did
actually take place with much solemnity,” and Maturin sits “on a kind of throne as judge” (363).
In this scene, Maturin uses the event as an opportunity to parody the justice system and to
reverse the usual gender dynamics by taking on the role of judge, which was “assumed half for
fun and half to inspire awe” (363). This role-playing “appeared to excite great anger amongst
them, for it is well known that they despise our sex” (363). The implications of this playful reenacting of a courtroom scene, with a white English woman sitting on a “throne as judge,” are
clearest within the context of the controversy over the Ilbert Bill (1883-4), which proposed
allowing native judges to try Anglo-Indians. This bill was overwhelmingly opposed by AngloIndians, resulting in what came to be known as a “white mutiny.” As Mrinalini Sinha has pointed
out, opposition to the bill had significant gender implications, both because the image of a white
woman made vulnerable before a native judge was a powerful symbol for rallying opposition and
because of the significant opposition by white women themselves (99). Among the vocal
opponents of the Ilbert Bill were Anglo-Indian tea planters, who, according to Jenny Sharpe,
objected to it out of fear that they would be held responsible for acts of cruelty against native
workers (Allegories 89). Maturin’s father, Edward Money, was one of the members of the
Anglo-Indian Association for Obtaining the Withdrawal of the Indian Criminal Procedure Act
Amendment Bill, so Maturin was likely aware of the arguments against the Bill, as well as the
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implications of a gendered re-working of the court.7 In Maturin’s version, the power dynamic has
been completely reversed with a white Englishwoman sitting in judgment of male Indians.
Likewise, the assertion that it is “well known that they despise our sex” points to a nexus
of arguments about the treatment of women in India that were used both in favor of empire and
of women’s emancipation. As Antoinette Burton points out, “rhetoric about Indian women’s
condition, which was equated with helplessness and backwardness, was no less crucial to notions
of British cultural superiority and to rationales for the British imperial presence in India than the
alleged effeminacy of the stereotypical ‘Oriental’ male” (7). According to Catherine Hall, “the
figure of the Indian woman” became an “index of Indian society’s desperate need for help” in
colonial discourse (52). The image of the degraded Indian woman, central to the discourse of
colonial responsibility, became an equally powerful argument for the emancipation of British
women. Without full political rights, feminists argued, British women were hampered in their
ability to help Indian women. In Burton’s words, British feminists deployed images of Indian
women as “helpless victims awaiting the representation of their plight and the redress of their
condition at the hands of their sisters in the metropole” (7). Thus, the allusion to Indian male
hatred for the female sex in Maturin’s narrative resonates beyond the immediate moment of
anger toward Maturin, and would furthermore suggest the Indian male’s attitude toward women
in general as both the cause of Indian women’s degradation and the argument for maintaining the
imperial power relations that Maturin exploits in this scene. Indeed, Maturin also makes a
gendered argument for female emancipation by showing the necessity of British womanhood to
police Indian male violence and misogyny. The feminized image of justice that she presents is
thus shorthand for feminist and imperialist arguments in favor of British superiority.
18
The rage unleashed by Maturin’s playacting of justice leads to a second midnight attack.
As described in the opening paragraph of this essay, the attacker lurks outside her bedroom late
at night. Describing her terror at seeing the intruder, Maturin assumes that the intrusion is
connected to the theft of the sheep: “I should not, perhaps, have been so terrified but for his
remarkable height and odiously fiendish expression. I felt certain, and do now, that it was our
Chamba Cinderella!” (364). In describing this moment, and her response to it, Maturin draws on
the trope of Indian male attacking a white English woman to emphasize her bravery and levelheadedness in a crisis. Rather than becoming a victim, or cringing in fear until she is rescued,
Maturin responds by firing at her attacker with a toy gun and running after him in pursuit. In this
way, the attempted attack becomes an opportunity to highlight her character as an adventurous
New Woman. Likewise, Maturin’s reference to the toy pistol fits into gendered discourses from
the period. Not only is she clear-headed enough to use a toy gun to scare off her attacker, but he
is naïve enough to be fooled by a child’s toy. Maturin explains her ability to fool the attacker in
racialized terms: “no European could possibly have been thus taken in; but a native, easily”
(364). Similarly, the reference to him as her “Chamba Cinderella” fits into discourses of
Orientalism by feminizing the Indian native and putting her in the position of the assertive —
even masculine — pursuer.
While it is not clear exactly what the intruder had planned, Sharpe might argue that this
scene of an armed native attacking an English woman in her bedroom would likely have
conjured up images of attempted rape for British readers. In Sharpe’s analysis, the accounts of
rape that dominated the British press after the siege of Lucknow continued to play out in literary
images that were part of a “colonial discourse on the native assault of English women in India”
(“Unspeakable” 216). Sharpe’s analysis of how unsubstantiated accounts of rape “produce[d]
19
value for colonialism” during the 1857 rebellion provides a useful framework for understanding
Maturin’s deployment of the colonial attack narrative to bolster her own credentials as a New
Woman (Allegories 4). Through these accounts, Sharpe asserts, British officials invoked “the
knightly virtues of honor, a veneration of women, and protection of the weak […] so that the
army as an institution could act as a punishing avenger” and suppress the threat to colonial
authority (Allegories 76, emphasis in original). Although rape is never mentioned in Maturin’s
narratives, the appearance of a threatening male outside her bedroom in the middle of the night
suggests the intent on a physical, if not sexual, attack, and these attacks play a central role in
Maturin’s narrative by illustrating her fearlessness and daring.
As a feminist critic, I feel slightly uncomfortable asserting that the attack on Maturin,
which may or may not have been an attempted rape, presents an opportunity for her.
Nevertheless, the repeated staging of physical, and at times sexual, threat against the female
body in the pages of the Wide World is central to the ways in which female writers demonstrated
their credentials both as authors and as adventurers. These are not just stories of beautiful
landscapes; the exotic or colonial landscape is always described as presenting an element of
threat. As these narratives show, within the space of the Wide World, the existence of the
threatening Other was essential to crafting an identity as imperial New Woman adventurer.
Likewise, looking at the Wide World through the lens of gender and empire reveals the
imperatives of the publishing industry in the late nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which
women writers could use those imperatives to carve out professional careers as authors. The
image of Maturin bravely fighting off an attack was the key motif in this story, as is suggested by
a column in the July 12, 1899 Derby Mercury that excerpts only the moment of the attack and
Maturin’s recourse to the toy pistol (“Saved by a Toy Pistol” 6). As this reprinting shows, the
20
image of the resourceful woman fending off a native male attacker was the crucial selling point
of the narrative. Likewise, in Maturin’s 1913 account of a trek in South Africa, Adventures
beyond the Zambesi, her traveling companion attempts to relieve her anxiety about a near escape
from a lion by reminding her “what splendid copy it is for your book” (136). Maturin’s work,
and the crafting of her identity as an imperial New Woman heroine, capitalizes on an economy
of peril in which her ability to navigate the dangers of the colonial environment through
gendered and racialized acts of conquest becomes a marketable commodity.
Notes:
1
I am grateful to Margaret Stetz, Mrinalini Sinha, Laurel Brake, Catherine Hart, and Christine
DeVine for their comments and advice on this material.
2
The critical conversation on British women’s complicity in imperialism is a rich one. See, in
particular, Levine, George, and Procida.
3
See Sinnema (4), Brake and Demoor (8), and Codell (410).
4
See Arata (107-132).
5
Both Clune and Geoffrey Maslen assert that the magazine’s circulation rose as a result of De
Rougement’s narrative, although neither one cites circulation figures. See Maslen, pages 111,
118, and 122. Although circulation figures for the magazine are elusive, Maslen’s detailed
reconstruction of the attention that other periodicals, especially the Daily Chronicle, devoted to
debating whether or not De Rougement’s story was true suggests that the magazine enjoyed
widespread interest and readership during this period.
6
For more detailed information on the Money family, see Green, especially chapters 3 and 4.
21
7
See “List of Members of the Anglo-Indian Association” in The Ilbert Bill: A Collection of
Letters, Speeches, Memorials, Articles, &c., Stating the Objections to the Bill (159).
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